V for Vendetta (Spoilers)
The jewel at this film's center is the backstory of Valerie, the concentration camp prisoner who scrawls her life story on a roll of toilet paper and stashes it in a rat hole to be discovered later by Natalie Portman's character Evey.
This 5-minute flashback (embedded in an otherwise deeply flawed film) delivers what every screen adaptation should: an already great story, spun through a linear accelerator and shot back at you in a flash of lightning and roar of thunder -- "that only celluloid can deliver." Like the sinking of the titular ship in James Cameron'sTitanic, or Gandalf's death in Peter Jackson's Fellowship of the Ring, knowing Valerie's scene is coming doesn't save you from the emotional devestation when it does. If you can sit through Valerie's tale without bursting into tears, you need to go to the local zoo and check yourself into the reptile house.
Otherwise, this is a wildly uneven film. The Wachowskis have an awesome talent for stitching together Pop Culture iconography, but a hard time shocking it to life. One senses hesitation and confusion on their part; they want us to like the character of V, which is unnecessary. He's weird enough and complex enough that we can't take our eyes off him. Like with Alex from A Clockwork Orange, even if he horrifies us, we're still hooked. We're going to keep watching him just to see what he does next. The Wachowskis aren't comfortable with telling a Trickster Tale, however; they keep trying to convert it into a Hero Tale, and somewhere in its oscillation between Cyrano de Bergerac and Fight Club it ends up bursting at the seams.
Out of my list of lesser complaints, the smallest but most infuriating one is this: Britain's future fascist government is seen to have replaced the Union Jack with a red-and-black banner suggestive of the Nazi flag. Why did this annoy me? Firstly, this flag was unconvincing for what it's supposed to be. (It's not visually arresting enough to be the emblem of a totalitarian movement, looking instead like some teenage skate-goth's 5-minute Photoshop-doodle.) Secondly, the filmmakers are cheating. The fascists' flag ought to be the Union Jack. Dramatically, V For Vendetta concerns itself with a personal political metamorphosis, from apathy to action. If the characters of the film are to be forced into tough choices -- and tough choices, after all, is what drama is all about -- then the Government needs to be cloaked in the trappings of "legitimacy" to make the characters' choices that much harder.
(Instead we get an Absurdly Evil Occupation Government that is, at the same time, Absurdly Incompetent. How incompetent? Enough not to notice when a factory receives an order for 500,000 Guy Fawkes masks, apparently.)
My other complaint about V For Vendetta is the production design. The film has an inexcusably cheap look to it, with an inattention to details and inconsistency of tone that sabotages the story at every turn. Visually, the film didn't sell me either Future or Fascism; nor did it sell me a "Found Future" located in the present day (a la Godard's Alphaville). You'd think that 20 years after Terry Gilliam's Brazil, any art director worthy of that title could do a retro-future-fascist Britain in their sleep.
This 5-minute flashback (embedded in an otherwise deeply flawed film) delivers what every screen adaptation should: an already great story, spun through a linear accelerator and shot back at you in a flash of lightning and roar of thunder -- "that only celluloid can deliver." Like the sinking of the titular ship in James Cameron'sTitanic, or Gandalf's death in Peter Jackson's Fellowship of the Ring, knowing Valerie's scene is coming doesn't save you from the emotional devestation when it does. If you can sit through Valerie's tale without bursting into tears, you need to go to the local zoo and check yourself into the reptile house.
Otherwise, this is a wildly uneven film. The Wachowskis have an awesome talent for stitching together Pop Culture iconography, but a hard time shocking it to life. One senses hesitation and confusion on their part; they want us to like the character of V, which is unnecessary. He's weird enough and complex enough that we can't take our eyes off him. Like with Alex from A Clockwork Orange, even if he horrifies us, we're still hooked. We're going to keep watching him just to see what he does next. The Wachowskis aren't comfortable with telling a Trickster Tale, however; they keep trying to convert it into a Hero Tale, and somewhere in its oscillation between Cyrano de Bergerac and Fight Club it ends up bursting at the seams.
Out of my list of lesser complaints, the smallest but most infuriating one is this: Britain's future fascist government is seen to have replaced the Union Jack with a red-and-black banner suggestive of the Nazi flag. Why did this annoy me? Firstly, this flag was unconvincing for what it's supposed to be. (It's not visually arresting enough to be the emblem of a totalitarian movement, looking instead like some teenage skate-goth's 5-minute Photoshop-doodle.) Secondly, the filmmakers are cheating. The fascists' flag ought to be the Union Jack. Dramatically, V For Vendetta concerns itself with a personal political metamorphosis, from apathy to action. If the characters of the film are to be forced into tough choices -- and tough choices, after all, is what drama is all about -- then the Government needs to be cloaked in the trappings of "legitimacy" to make the characters' choices that much harder.
(Instead we get an Absurdly Evil Occupation Government that is, at the same time, Absurdly Incompetent. How incompetent? Enough not to notice when a factory receives an order for 500,000 Guy Fawkes masks, apparently.)
My other complaint about V For Vendetta is the production design. The film has an inexcusably cheap look to it, with an inattention to details and inconsistency of tone that sabotages the story at every turn. Visually, the film didn't sell me either Future or Fascism; nor did it sell me a "Found Future" located in the present day (a la Godard's Alphaville). You'd think that 20 years after Terry Gilliam's Brazil, any art director worthy of that title could do a retro-future-fascist Britain in their sleep.